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This reference architecture details the server, storage and software configurations for the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 with Fusion ioMemory SX350 PCIe Application Accelerator devices. The combination delivers superb performance, with the ability to host large data warehouses or a consolidation of data warehouses such as this 24TB example with SQL Server 2014.

Executive Summary

This document is for individuals (BI architects, DBAs, report developers, and IT directors) involved in decision making who are looking for guidance when designing enterprise, business-intelligence applications.

The Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse Fast Track (DWFT) reference architecture is designed to eliminate the complexity of properly sizing hardware, which helps reduce unnecessary scale-out of storage and servers. The sizing techniques used in SQL server DWFT will properly size servers, based on I/O and CPU consumption. This consumption based approach ensures your data warehouse can fully take advantage of your hardware investment.

Fusion ioMemory devices use flash like memory instead of like disk. This gives applications native access to data, delivering the lightning-fast response times that businesses depend on today.

Industries such as banking, social media, retail, transportation, healthcare, security, entertainment, and research and development, all benefit greatly from this solution. Service levels are increased, while complex and expensive storage sprawl is significantly reduced.

In addition, the Fusion ioMemory platform reduces energy consumption and total cost of ownership. The Fusion ioMemory platform integrates hardware and software to overcome the limitations of legacy architectures and specialized hardware.

IT managers, database architects, and CTOs looking to explore and deploy data warehouses and BI applications now have added leverage – they can take advantage of Fusion ioMemory engineering, integration and optimization to quickly build and deploy their next data warehouses.

About the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9

Reliability, serviceability and near continuous availability, backed by a comprehensive warranty, making it ideal for any server environment.

Designed to reduce costs and complexity, leveraging Intel’s latest E5-2600 v3 processors with up to 70% performance gain, plus the latest HPE DDR4 SmartMemory supporting 1.5TB and up to 14% performance increase. Additional support is available for 12Gb SAS and 40Gb NIC, with a broad range of graphics and compute options.

With this significant performance improvement, customers can reduce infrastructure and reduce power and cooling costs over a traditional hard disk drive infrastructure, for a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). With over 7,000 customers and over 250,000 units sold, this latest generation of PCIe application accelerators is designed to provide customers with the peace of mind that these products will perform in the field as intended.

New Data Warehouse Features in Microsoft® SQL Server® 2014.

Microsoft added clustered column store indexes (CCI) in SQL Server 2014, which are designed to decrease query response times and deliver deeper levels of data compression. CCI eliminates the need to build summary tables, thus further reducing ETL run times.

CCI is optimized for query performance. Our solutions deliver an order-of-magnitude of 7x better query performance when using CCI. The CCI solution accomplishes this by using a columnar format to compress the data by 10x or more, processing a set of rows in batches, and reading only the columns that are referenced in the query.

CCI is updateable allowing concurrent insert – both bulk import and trickle – of new data while the query workload is running. This reduces the data latency from the time data is born to when it is available for querying.

General Settings

Operating System Settings

The operating system used for this Fast Track Data Warehouse test was Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition. Standard installation steps were used to install the operating system with default values, followed by service packs and update patches.

Windows Configuration – Power Settings

The High Performance plan was chosen to reduce CPU throttling.

Fusion ioMemory SX350 Settings

Each device was formatted to its default capacity with a block size of 512B. The raw disk was then used as a mount point and an NTFS file system was applied using the default space and geometry, with an allocation unit size of 4096KB.

Power Override

Enabling the power override setting on the Fusion ioMemory SX350 product line allows the device to draw up to 55 watts of power under heavy workloads and is required to achieve the performance results below. All cards must be configured at the same time and a server reboot is required for the setting to be active and persist.

Example:

fio-config –p FIO_EXTERNAL_POWER_OVERRIDE SN:MW

where < SN > is the serial number of the card obtained from fio-status, and < MW > is the power in milliwatts. The following example configures the device with the given serial number to 55W:

The table below describes the storage configuration used for various devices and slots.

Slot

Device

Capacity

Mount Point

Allocation

Notes

2

Fusion ioMemory SX350

3.2TB

C:\DB\DATA

Data Files \ TempDB \ Logs

RAID 5

3

Fusion ioMemory SX350

3.2TB

C:\DB\DATA

Data Files \ TempDB \ Logs

RAID 5

5

Fusion ioMemory SX350

3.2TB

C:\DB\DATA

Data Files \ TempDB \ Logs

RAID 5

6

Fusion ioMemory SX350

3.2TB

C:\DB\DATA

Data Files \ TempDB \ Logs

RAID 5

N/A

2 x 10K SAS

1.2TB

C:\

OS

Mirrored

UEFI Configuration

Hyper-Threading was enabled.

Operating mode was changed to "Maximum Performance”.

Fan Offset was set to “Increased Cooling”.

SQL Server Settings

Database Configuration

A 1TB data warehouse schema was created for benchmarking using the Fast Track toolkit. The schema used a master filegroup with 4 additional filegroups that represented the four partitions.

TempDB Configuration

Eight 10GB tempdb files were stored across four Fusion ioMemory volumes. The tempdb transaction log file was stored on the volume designated for log files.

Memory Allocation

SQL Server was allocated 118GB of the available server memory.

Local Security Policy

The SQL Server maintenance account was granted the following privileges:

Enable Lock Pages in Memory

Perform Volume Maintenance Tasks

SQL Server 2014 Configuration Parameters

Parameter

Setting

Description

Memory Allocation

118GB

This is the Fast Track-required value for a 2-socket, 1TB database. Memory is deliberately constrained to enforce I/O pressure on the subsystem.

Max Degree of Parallelism

28

When SQL Server runs on a computer with more than one microprocessor or CPU, it detects the best degree of parallelism (the number of processors employed to run a single statement).

Resource Governor memory Allocation

12%

Default is 25%. This is reduced to 12% for both Row Store and Column Store to reduce the maximum memory consumed per query.

Fast Track Required Start-up Parameters

-T1117

-T1117 should be added to the startup options.
This trace flag ensures even growth of all files in a file group in case autogrow is enabled. The standard FTDW recommendation for database file growth is to pre-allocate rather than use autogrow (with the exception of tempdb).

Summary

Together, HPE and SanDisk dedicated hundreds of hours of testing to engineer the SQL Server DWFT solution to provide the most optimal reliability and performance. These series of tests pushed the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 to peak performance without hardware failure. The reliability and performance experienced during testing is what can be expected in production environments.

The same configuration meets the need of both Row Store and Column Store configurations, delivering high physical read throughput in the Row Store configuration at 4.7GB/s, and high query rates in the Column Store configuration at 1,649 Q/Hr/TB.